GENRES OF REALISM ACROSS THE FORMER COLD WAR DIVIDE
GENRES OF REALISM ACROSS THE FORMER COLD WAR DIVIDE

NEOLIBERAL NOVELS AND SELF-FICTION

Summary/Abstract: The article explores and correlates two genres of the new literary realism that emerged around the year 2000, as they were conceptualized and instantiated in fiction across the two sides of the Atlantic, in North America and Romania, respectively. The common background of this global wave of realism relates to the post-Cold War definitive entrenchment of neoliberalism and to its corresponding topics of personal identity, which provide the vantage point of the realist social observation. Despite the post-communist critical elite’s bias for topics of memory and communism, the genre of “self-fiction” that emerged in millennial Romanian literature shared with the “neoliberal novels” theorized in Anglo-American criticism an underlying compliance with status-quo capitalism and its defining myths of individuality.

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